Making the Connection-Israel & 21st Century Jewish Ed

The 21^st century and Israel Education are having a tough time together.

The awe-struck, Kibbutz-blue, sabra-promoting ideals of Israel education are long gone. Instead of loving Israel first, and questioning Israel second, our students are questioning first, and sometimes not loving at all. In an age when students expect to be empowered and have access to the world and its information, our students are demanding accountability and morality from an Israel that they do not understand. They are challenging Israel’s actions without any grasp of the complexities of Israel’s reality. Axiomatic love of Israel has become passé, replaced with ambivalence about, and even hostility towards Israel that is impossible to ignore or deny.

For many of our students today, and in fact many of our young leaders, there is a profound alienation between their perceptions of Jewish morality and the actions of the Jewish state. While my parents grew up with Israel-as-David, miraculously winning the Six Day War, my children are growing up with Israel-as-Goliath, the perpetual aggressors. Bombarded by images and blitzed by a world media whose agenda is a de facto de-legitimization of Israel, unless we change course, that alienation will grow more pronounced as we head towards 2020.

I’ve been teaching classes on Israel, Zionist history, and Israel advocacy for years. Do I question Israel? Yes. Do I condemn Israel for its decisions that I agree with? Of course. Do I blindly parrot Israeli policymakers and Likudnikim? Never. But I do begin my criticism of Israel from a place of love and support for the Jewish homeland, and that is an attitude that is less pervasive in our communities and schools than it was even fifteen years ago.

This is an alarming trend, and one that must be reversed. But it’s a dual challenge. We need to both reinvigorate our communities and institutions with a palpable and relevant Zionism that speaks to our contemporaries in new and meaningful ways, and at the same time teach our students about how use technology and the global network in positive ways to effect change.

As an educator, it’s naïve not to admit that the traditional gatekeepers of knowledge and information (teachers, librarians, and parents, for example) have been brushed aside in favor of the iPhone, Google Chrome, and Wikipedia. With all information seemingly a smart-phone touch-screen away, students feel less and less need to consult with us first before leaping to their own conclusions.

Luckily, the job descriptions of “parent”, “teacher”, and “librarian” have been evolving as well. While we aren’t the only sources of knowledge anymore, we certainly have to be more than observers as this generation researches and learns online. We need to, in the context of our teaching, embrace our students’ connectivity but make sure we are doing our best to ensure that they are connecting to the people, places, and networks that will foster the kinds of attitudes that we seek to fill them with. We need to find the leaders in our classes who will be profoundly impacted by attending the AIPAC policy conference, or who design websites like this one (and yes, the founder of that website is my current student), or who will write articles in their student newspapers about Israel.

We are as much teachers now as headhunters, plugging in our most talented voices and motivated students into a network that will push them to become leaders in ways so different that we experienced when we were their age.

The scary thing is that despite all of this, my children, your children, and our grandchildren aren’t going to love and support Israel, and question and demand more of Israel in a way which is affirming of Zionism and Israel’s existence, unless we model that passion and commitment as well. So it’s about way more than protecting them from hateful anti-Israel and anti-Zionist material online, or teaching children that oftentimes videos and photos can be doctored to make Israel look bad on purpose, or giving our students the social media tools to go out and be activists in the global network. It’s about starting at the beginning, teaching a love for Israel and a care for Israel that this new generation will use as the foundation of a lifetime spent searching for meaning and connection to the Jewish homeland. And unfortunately, if we don’t begin now, the alienation may in fact be irreversible.

Knowing in the 21st Century

know/nō/Verb

To "know" can mean many things, including:

1.     To grasp with clarity

2.     To regard as true

3.     To have fixed in the mind *

4.     To have experienced of

5.     To Become aware

6.     To possess knowledge*

7.     To have sexual intercourse with (Biblical)

Educationally, knowing has long been a goal for the learning process. However, within the process of schooling, whether for general or Jewish education, what “knowing” was privileged and for what purpose has varied over time.

Andrew S. Molnar, in his article “Computers in Education: A Brief History”, cites Nobel prize winner, Herbert Simon, that developments in science and information process have changed the nature of knowing. While in the past knowing meant having information stored in one’s memory (definition #6 above, and perhaps #3), knowing has evolved to become the process of having access to information and knowing how to use it (close to definitions #1, #4 and #5 above). With the act of knowing changing due the changing nature of how we access and store information in the digital age, we must consider how we educate Jews different to “know” what is necessary to engage as Jews. 

Currently, much of our schooling frameworks, curricula and pedagogies promote the learning of information that can be stored and later utilized, such as the acquisition of information from primary Jewish sources, whether Rabbinic or Biblical, the rituals and holidays engaged in throughout the calendar and lifecycle events and even Jewish narratives.  Perhaps, the question now needs to be how to we construct educational efforts and design schooling that will prepare students with great access to information to use the information properly, to discern what information is appropriate for their chosen path and how to design self-directed engagement with information, so that they will “know” how to use the abundant information recently made open and available, like never before in our history.

In valuing a new form of “knowing” as vital to living and doing Jewish in the 21^st century, we redefine our notion of Jewish literacy.  Jackie Marsh, in her article “New Literacies and Old Pedagogies: Recontextualizing Rules and Practices” designed research that determined that the changing nature of what it means to be literate in the outside world dictates that schools must generate new methods, content, learning process and mediums to better reflect these changes. How too must Jewish literacy models reflect the outside world? We must consider new texts, rituals and technology used to engage in Judaism in the 21^st century, and not depend on pedagogies and notions of literacy that reflect a Jewish way of life and engagement that has been passed by as we turned the century and entered into a digital reality. Why do we need construct our student Jewish learning around teaching how to utilize tools, content and mediums such as Facebook, blogs and popular culture? Why don’t we teach practices that reflect the breadth of engagement in Jewish world, and ask our students to struggle with the tension for changing rituals and practices? Why not have students explore online articles such as this one on Tattoos by Dvora Meyers on Tablet as a way of engaging in thoughtful textual analysis as a 21^st century model for engaging in Jewish practice and behavior?

As Marsh argues, changing literacy models demands a change in pedagogy and the role of the teacher. Patt Herr demonstrates in her expiremental research documents in the “The Changing Role of the Teacher (Industry Trend or Event)” that the primary goals of schooling have been to transmit culture, from the past generations to the current generation, and to prepare youth for the world we live in.  Jewish Education, having been heavily influenced by universalist tendencies inherent in public schools, function to serve these dual purposes. However, more focus has been paid to the transmission of culture than to effectively preparing youth to live Jewishly in the world we live in. The digital world will make it much more complicated and much more necessary to develop students ability to learn how to live as Jews in the digital world.

This demands models of teaching that deviate from the “Sage on the Stage” model of a teacher Jewish education remains much more comfortable with in formal environments.  This model, established as far back as Maimonides, fits comfortably with the model centralized Rabbinic figure of authority. This was not always the case; for even in Talmudic times, teachers served as facilitator of learning in the “guide on the side model”, a model we need to reclaim and enable Jewish education to be at the forefront of changing the teaching paradigm.

A teacher as guide will be better enabled to move our youth beyond being smart, to being wise, for Judaism as far back as Pirkei Avot has valued Chochma (wisdom). Marc Prensky pushes us beyond the bifurcation of digital immigrant and digital natives to recognize those who have digital wisdom as most capable within the digital world. In “H. Sapiens Digital: From Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives to Digital Widsom”, Prensky recognize that in the digital age, widsom means to access the power of digital enhancements and the prudent use of technology to enhance our capabilities. For Prensky, like Simon, sees wisdom as the highmost realization of knowing how to discern the difference between right and wrong in engaging with the tools and information made possible in our digital age. Prensky makes the case that the ultimate knowing we can enable our students with is moral rather than technological.

We need to consider the fourth son from the Passover seder, the one who does not “know” how to ask.  The worst we can do as educators is not prepare our students to “know” how to access the information and knowledge in order to ask the right questions, moral and otherwise.  We need to utilize our Jewish wisdom to teach how to be digitally wise, in discerning right from wrong

In  “Redesigning Jewish Education for the 21^st Century: A Lipmann Kanfer Institute Working Paper” by Jonathan Woocher, Renee Rubin Ross & Merideth Woocher, a case was made for a Jewish educational paradigm designed for a changing digital world. The authors designated three design principles: 1)Learner as active agent;

2) Power of relationships and the social experience of learning; 3)Life Centered Jewish Education.

It has been three and half years since this work was first introduced to the Jewish education conversation. How far have we come? These design principles laid the groundwork for better understanding how to cultivate a generation of Jews who will truly know what it means to be and do Jewish. Will they be wise? Will they know how to utilize and discern the Judaism they can now encounter on their own? Have we truly built or transformed the model what it means to cultivate a literate Jew, in terms of content, process and medium?

Shoah Education in the 21st Century

Today marks Yom Hashoah V'hagevurah, which means the Day of the Catastrophe (Holocaust) and Heroism. I am often remiss that in we often omit the second part of the day's title, not to mention translate Shoah as Holocaust, which actually means burning by fire. This date marks the anniversary of the Warsaw uprising, which is why, in 1951, the Israeli Government chose this date to commemorate the catastrophe of the Holocaust by recognizing both the victims and the heroes.

The commemoration of Yom Hashoah in our Jewish schools offers us a unique opportunity to reflect on the ways we educate our youth about the historical significance of the holocaust and the many lessons to be gained through the study and immersion in this critical event in Jewish history and experience. My colleague and friend, Jake Wirtschafter, an excellent Jewish History teacher and DeLeT Alumni leader posted his thoughts here on the 21^st Century JewishEd Blog on the state of Holocaust Education in the 21^st Century. Last year, Jake Facing History honored with Margot Stern Strom award for his excellence in teaching the field of Holocaust Education.

Like Jake, I am concerned with the future of how we educate young Jews about the Shoah.  While the Shoah Foundation has dutifully dedicated immense resources to capturing the voices of many survivors and archived them for a myriad of uses, this does not fully replicate the unique value afforded by the sharing of first hand accounts of their narratives.  However, as time passes and survivors continue to age, less and less holocaust survivors remain available, either because they have tied or are become unable to communicate. This presents a great challenge to creating the unique personal connection necessary to allow Jewish youth to connect with the narrative of the holocaust as part of their personal narrative and not just as another narrative in Jewish history. Zionist/Israel education has struggled as well with maintaining a connection with Jewish youth in their relationship to the establishment of the state of Israel, but more on that next week in honor of Yom Ha’atzmaut.

As the 21^st century progresses, Jewish educators will need to determine the message of holocaust education.  Will we focus on the need to confront genocide in the present global reality? Will we focus on the holocaust as a primary part of the large Zionist narrative? Will the holocaust be used to confront anti-Semitism and promote Jewish survivalism? Will we focus our holocaust lesson on teaching tolerance of the other?

Currently, thousands of high school seniors from across the world, including over a hundred from my own school, find themselves in Poland as part of the March of the Living. The BJE-LA organizes the Los Angeles contingent’s program. This week, Jewish Journal editor-in-chief, Rob Eshman, provided an editorial as a letter to his son, one of my school’s seniors participating in the MOTL, which brings up several critiques of this program as a tool for experiential Holocaust education. Despite his concerns, Rob, being the great parent he is, chose to allow his son to make his own decision in experiencing this journey.

The March of Living experience provides a unique first hand encounter with major sites from the Holocaust’s narrative, within a larger narrative of renewal found in the departure from Poland and arrival in Israel in time for the commemoration of Yom Hazikaron (Israel’s Memorial Day) and the celebrations Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel’s Independence Day). One of the central components of the MOTL experience is the involvement of survivors who participate in the experience with the students.  Critiques of this process have come from many directions, including survivors (see Jake’s post), religion Zionists and Israeli filmmakers, such as Yoav Shamir, whose film Defamation severely critiques the use of the March of the Living’s imprint on Israeli youth.

If experiential programs that bring students directly to the site will not satisfy critics, and will be limited by the lack of access to survivors, what other programs will be able to fill the gap.  Facing History, an in depth curricular program, has invested great resources into training and developing teachers within Jewish and General educational settings to nurture democracy and fight bigotry in ethics education utilizing historical frameworks, including the history of the Holocaust, to foster a more ethical and knowledgeable populace for the 21^st century.

Centropa seeks to bring to life the narratives of Jewish life in Central Europe before and after WWII through the use of archival materials.  After investing in bringing Jewish educators to Central Europe to learn together about the Jewish past and present and the central European Jewish communities, Centropa has created numerous curriculums and a central web space called Centropa Student to facilitate the use of their materials within a school setting to foster a direct connection to Jewish life in Central Europe. From my own school, three faculty members have participated, including two non-Jewish history teachers.  One of whom, Nick Holton, who blogs about his work at http://www.sphericalteetertotter.com, has created an impressive project for his 10^th grade world history course that utilizes the 21^st Century tool of digital storytelling to foster an academic and emotional connection between students and their historical subjects.

Nick describes the project:

Students will engage in a digital storytelling project on the Holocaust. Through these projects, students will need to grapple with some of the greater questions surrounding the Holocaust, their own feelings and emotions and the basic historical content. As they do so they will be writing about these issues in one of two ways. The first is through an “alter-ego” that will experience the Holocaust in its many parts. This “alter-ego” can be fictional or non-fictional. The choice is the students. The second option is a more literal and personal approach through a digital diary. This format allows the student to recap each day of class, the questions posed, the lesson learned and the emotional results it fostered. When finished with the writing, students will then turn their stories or journals into seven to ten minute films or digital stories completely constructed and narrated by them. These films will then be uploaded to your student portfolio network on ning.com for viewing by other students, faculty and, of course, parents. This project will complete the courses necessary requirements of Holocaust content, technology integration and 21st century media literacy.

Here is a sample of the project from Nick’s former students (and my current student) Rachel Bornstein:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrncxKLyk74

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6Mlv2ve2BQ&feature=related

Another model of bringing holocaust narratives to life through student voices comes from Jennifer Rudick Zunikoff, a master Jewish educator and storyteller, who works with students at Goucher College in a course titled “Oral History of the Holocaust”. Jennifer teaches her students the craft of taking oral histories from survivors and then retelling their stories through the art of storytelling. While Jennifer will have to consider how to college the oral histories one survivors are unavailable, the mastery comes from the students abilities to translate the information they collect and construct a living testament to the person, life and experience of the survivor’s story they are telling.

In the 21^st century, the future of holocaust and Shoah education will need to transform into a multi-faceted endeavor that integrates experiential, curricula and self-directed learning efforts. Above all, we need to create ways for students to interact with historical artifacts and through the process of bringing them to life once again because personally transformed. Only through a process of personal transformation when interacting with the Shoah will Never Again be truly possible in the 21^st century through Holocaust education. This requires renewed investment not just in the collecting of artifacts in museums, but in training educators in order to allow them to creatively consider the great task of the future of educating Jewish youth about and through the Shoah.

Bridging the Generation Gap

15 years ago I discovered AOL. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it came to my house in the form of a CD-ROM and I had my father upload it to our PC, enter his credit card info and we had our own dial up account to the internet.  Except, to get on the web, I had to choose a screen name, and interested in anonymity, I chose my screen name “spottingu” out of my love for the film Trainspotting. For fifteen years “spottingu” has been my personal online identity for email, instant messenger, accounts, twitter, etc, if only I had realized that everyone presumed I had an interest in online stalking.

Today, I began the process of “growing up” and established a gmail account, with the hopes of transitioning out of my AOL identity in order to establish a new online identity more befitting my 32-year-old self.  Not wanting to completely obliterate my less than professional presence online, I chose a new moniker that reflects my childhood nickname, and will now be “yakhoffman”. Please do not think that this is not a big deal.  Being “Spottingu” fostered my growth and development of both my online and adult identity. I met my wife in an AOL Jewish Chat Room (anyone remember Jewish Chat 18-15? ASL anyone?), not to mention many good friends as well.  All of my family and friends have always known me and communicated with me online as “Spottingu”. I applied to countless jobs as “Spottingu; what was I thinking?

I bring this up as I read Marc Prensky’s seminal works “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” Part I and Part II and Don Tapscott’s “Growing Up Digital”, within which both authors articulate a clear generational divide between those that are digital natives or from the net-generation, respectively, and the digital immigrants and baby boomer generation.

In Growing up Digital, Tapscott comments on the Net Generation (N-Generation):

The generation of children who, in 1999, will be between the ages of two and twenty-two, not just those are active on the Internet. (P.3)

The N-Generation now represents 30 percent of the population, compared to the boomers’ 29 percent. For the first time, there is another generation large enough to rival the cultural hegemony of the ubiquitous boomers. But what makes N-Geners unique is not just their large numbers, but that they are growing up during the dawn of a completely new interactive medium of communication. (P. 15)

Some have suggested we describe today’s youth as Generation Y. I am not convinced this is the best term to use and I think it important to get it right; terms acquire meaning and they share our thinking (my emphasis). No one is clear what Generation Y really is. Most of those who have raised the term use it to refer to the youth of today, those who were born at the end of the 1970s when the birth rate began to increase after he baby bust years, but beyond that the notion is fuzzy. More important Generation Y also builds on the confusion sown about Generation X, which isn’t a generation at all but the last few years of the boom. I believe that N-Generation is a better term in that it codifies in a unified term the power of demographics with the power of new media analysis. (P.33)

While I have always felt comfortable with Prensky’s designation as a "digital native", fluent in the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet, I found the “Digital Natives” designation to be too broad, since I found people much younger and older sharing this fluency. I always became frustrated that I seemed to have to arrived too late to be a part of Gen-X. I love my grunge, but I came onto the scene in my later teens after the hype had already died down. I too felt too old to fit into the characteristics of Generation-Y.  Tapscott’s designation of the N-Generation seemed to fit me much more comfortably, as if I finally found a designation that fit both my age (I just made the cut, being 21 in 1999) and my early adoption and engagement in the Internet and the New Media and its impact on me.  While I may have missed my professional opportunity to engage in (and cash in on) the Dot-com bubble, I am now appreciating the value of being an educator in the 2010s as one of the elders of the N-Generation.

Reading Tapscott’s “Growing Up Digital”, published in 1998, took me on a wild nostalgic ride to the days when chat rooms reigned and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, a member of the N-Generation, was still in high school dreaming of going to Harvard. Tapscott did not foresee social networking, let alone Napster and its impact on file sharing and piracy, which wrecked havoc on traditional media outlets.  Tapscott did prophesize the explosion of self-expression, see youtube and myspace. He foretold key characteristics of the N-generation (acceptance of diversity, broad curiosity, assertiveness and self-reliance).

On education, Tapscott wrote, "We need to understand the purpose of the schools-the ends of education, not just means." Tapscott already recognized that the rise of the N-Generation would lead to many Baby Boomers to react by trying to infuse technology into schools and to try to maintain the status quo of socialization and acculturation that satisfied their generation.  Yet, as has been proven, the N-Generation demands more from their educational efforts, and we must still address Tapscott’s truism to understand the purpose of schools in the new age.

My Jewish identity and learning developed distinctly because I received, to my “Spottingu” email inbox, hundreds of emails a week offering me direct Torah study, list servs and web resources through which I expanded and diversified my Judaic understanding, providing me with the pluralistic and complex diversity of understanding that allows me to serve as a Rabbinic educator today. I fell in love with the study of bible/Tanach, due to the range of sources available online. As an early adopter of the Internet, I met my wife online before J-Date existed, I found Jewish learning and community online and create new material to share with others.

While I was not necessarily born into the digital age, I came of age during the rise of the Internet allows me to serve as a unique bridge between the Baby Boomer generation and the Net-Generation (and between Gen-X, Gen-Y, and Gen-Z).  As an educator of today’s generation in their formative teen years, I can provide a bridge between the knowledge of the past, the processes of the present and a vision of the future. I can share with today’s youth their characteristic passion to explore new worlds, to express themselves and to solve real world problems now. While I did not go through adolescence with a super computer in my pocket (I got my first cell, ne’ car phone, in 1996), I relate to the need to be connected at all times to others digitally. 

Yet I also appreciate the concerns of the Baby Boomer parents, academics and administrators still struggling to grasp how quickly the world has changed. Even I wonder if Tapscott’s 1998 is just 13 years ago. Four and a half years ago my first daughter was born, before I had first signed up with Facebook. I can’t even imagine how I notified all of our friends and family of her birth, let alone share pictures, prior to Facebook. I wonder if the point isn’t to be nostalgic of a long ago past, or to believe we can prophesize what the future holds, but to appreciate that this May, as hopefully our second daughter joins us, I will have amazing digital tools, such as Facebook and text messaging, to celebrate with others, otherwise I may have had to rely on phone trees and the post office.

I hope to explore further how my unique vantage point, as an elder member of the N-Generation, provides me with a unique perspective on educating today’s youth for the digital world we live in, as Jews, American citizens and humans.